TL;DR: Open Source projects are a great way to start working on something. On any topic (like Jekyll or Bootstrap, for example) there are dozens of repos you can check out. The downer is that even repos that were popular a few years ago may not be up to date. Nor well supported by an active community. Live and learn which rabbit holes to jump into.

– In mucking around to find a digital shoebox for all the code I am learning (and how to start building projects), the first order of business for me was to find a publishing platform.

“No” to Wordpress

My first instinct was to go with wordpress. I’d been using it for years. And Elegant Themes had just come out with Divi 3.0 - probably the only WP theme anyone would ever need. But I figured I wanted to try something different, and learn something new.

Besides, I wanted to to avoid spending more on hosting.

“Yes” to Github Pages

Github Pages was the obvious choice. I was getting used to the Git-Add-Push-Commit pattern and wanted to have a reason to keep Git top of my mind. Aside from being a free hosting service, Github also provides a blog framework in Jekyll.

(I get off on these tangents, so in researching the best way to use Github Pages for my portfolio site, I learned all about how Github’s founder, Tom Preston-Werner created Jekyll as a quick way to publish. In markdown. Like a Hacker.)

“Yes” to Responsive

I also wanted to make my portfolio site accessible via mobile. So I wanted to make it a responsive site - and focused on a Jekyll / Bootstrap combination. I’d also learned to use Bootstrap with HTML/CSS/JavaScript/jQuery at the bootcamp, so I was familiar with half of the equation.

“Yes” to Jekyll

So in my mind I saw a portfolio site